With the crisis in the Eurozone approaching its climax, I was curious to read the collective mind. On the Web, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter there is a lot of buzz about Eurozone breakup or survival.

I decided to ask both the swarm (through blogs) and experts (through News Web sites) as well as the crowd (through Twitter), using our Condor coolhunting tool.
It turns out, swarm and experts think the Euro will survive intact - albeit by quite a slim margin:

The picture above shows the Blog/Web site network, with the two search terms weighted by the importance (betweenness centrality) of the bloggers and Web sites. The bloggers/Web sites vote 52% for Eurozone survival, and 48% for Eurozone breakup.

The crowd, measured through the tweeters , believes the opposite. The picture below shows the snapshot of today (11/27/2011) of the retweets about “euro survive” and “euro breakup”.

The crowd on Twitter votes only 33% for Eurozone survival, with a decisive 67% of the vote for Eurozone breakup.

The question now is: whom to trust? The crowd is fickle, and the wisdom of crowds easily flips to madness, while the swarm usually has a much better grasp of what the future might be bringing. So perhaps it’s not as bleak for the EURO, as everybody thinks?

What do the Wikipedians think about the Euro?
As an additional expert opinion, I also checked, using our new Wikimaps tool, what the Wikipedians think about the EURO, exploiting the hidden link structure in Wikipedia. I ranked the links by two different algorithms: (1) by the numbers of links and backlinks, and by (2) actuality, i.e. freshness of the edits.
As the two pictures below show, the link-network looks very different for the two rating-algorithms:


Just looking at the Wikipedia linking structure (top picture) puts the different coins and currencies making up the Euro closest. While the economy of Europe is important for both networks, in the actuality picture (bottom network) the economy of Greece and Portugal, Frankfurt, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel suddenly become key players.